Technology has finally caught up with Francie Bishop Good, making it possible to create the works she was destined to produce.  In Carly TV, Bishop Good uses advances in digital imaging to manipulate photographs she took of her pre-pubescent niece Carly in her suburban living room with its omnipresent television set.  The new computer technology allows Bishop Good to work with images in a manner that merges photography and painting with remarkable results.

Since the 1980s, Bishop Good has always combined characteristics of painting with photography.  Her large expressionistic paintings of the early 1990s, for example, encase family snapshots in their craggy terrain.  At times, the expressionistic painted surfaces function as frames for photographs of her baby daughter, other family members, or the family dog, which dominate the compositions.  In other paintings, the photographs are buried treasures hidden beneath veils of pigment.

Although Bishop Good considers herself a painter, she began moving away from traditional painting techniques with her fiberglass resin series of 1995-97.  Rather than apply conventional acrylic or oil paints with a brush to canvas, Bishop Good cast brown and clear fiberglass resins and subsequently assembled them into free-form compositions.  She once again incorporated family snapshots into these works by laminating them to the surface.  As in her earlier canvases, realistic photographs contrast with expressionistic, abstract surfaces.

By 1998, Bishop Good, like many other artist of the decade, turned almost exclusively to working in photography.  However, painting continued to play an important role in these works.  In this series, she actually painted with photographic emulsion or paint itself onto photographs she had taken of her children swimming under water.  She scanned these multi-media images into the computer and printed out the hybrid works.  The dramatic results suggest a lush underwater world.  The colorful painting-like gestures resemble a textured terrain, but the Plexiglas laminate distances the viewer from the photograph’s surface.

Bishop Good works intuitively and there is always a sense of rapid evolution of approach and technique from one work to another.  While perfecting the Underwater series, she began experimenting with digital technology.  The result of this exploration with this new media is the captivating Carly TV series.  In these works, the evolution is more rapid and complex than in any of her previous series.

Bishop Good’s niece Carly was nine years old when she became the subject of her aunt’s Carly TV series.  The title of the series literally describes compositions always pairing Carly and a television, both sharing equal billing.  As is often the case for Bishop Good, the series was not premeditated.  After taking several pictures of her niece in her living room, she realized that the television set was as dominant as Carly in the composition.  The effect was so disquieting that Bishop Good decided to increase the tension by digitally manipulating the television images.  The first of these works includes scenes from commercial television.  Such public figures as Senator Jesse Helms and former Russian president Yeltsin invade Carly’s Pennsylvania home like sinister and colossal specters.  These initial attempts recall Martha Rosler’s conceptual photography piece from the Vietnam era, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, in which Rosler seamlessly montaged scenes of the Vietnam War from Life magazine onto photographs of American middle class houses published in House Beautiful.  Bishop Good’s message is more subtle than Rosler’s as she weaves a multitude of social and cultural issues through the Carly TV series.

Some of the images in the first Carly TV photographs also incorporate television commercial.  In Bishop Good’s Carly TV, Viagra Man, the vision of actors in a coy commercial for the wonder drug for male erectile dysfunction fills the television screen.  In this image and in Carly TV, Viagra Kiss, Carly’s hypnotic gaze toward the screen is especially striking.  Although the commercials for Viagra are discrete and meant for a general audience, one still wonders what the impressionable young girl is gleaning from this scene.  The viewer becomes so fixated on Carly’s gaze that it becomes apparent Bishop Good is also interested in contrasting the various acts of seeing involved in these works.  In addition to Carly’s gaze, there is the gaze of the photographer and by extension that of the viewer, as well as the incessant gaze of Big Brother television.

The images of commercial television dominating the first photographs of the series gave way the incorporation of details from old master paintings.  Ironically, Bishop Good’s recent fascination with digital imaging brought her back to her roots in painting.  She noticed that the television screen and its surrounding box are comparable to a framed canvas and reinforced this similarity by substituting paintings for the television images.  Initially, Bishop Good seemed primarily concerned with contrasting painted images from the history of art with the candidness of photography.  But here, too, the process and intent evolved as Bishop Good began to simulate the chiaroscuro and extreme foreshortening techniques of the old masters in her own compositions.  In Carly TV, Marat, for example, Carly appears to be bathed in the same unearthly light as Jacques Louis David’s The Death of Marat.  In Carly TV, Cat Carly’s arm reaches forward in the grand manner of Baroque painting.  These works reinforce the idea that the photographic image is as constructed and artificial as conventional painted canvases.

The transformation of Carly from the first series of photographs to the next is also remarkable.  In the early photographs, Carly seems unaware of the camera and poses with an unassuming candor.  The following year, she emerged as a self-conscious model striking provocative poses in a foxy platinum wig, and skimpy bathing suit. In Carly TV, Marat she stretched out on the floor like a Playboy centerfold, while in Carly TV, Cowboy Hat and Wig her pose and props suggest she has seen to many of the sensational television shows about the murdered child beauty contestant JonBenet Ramsey.  Bishop Good neither dressed nor directed her niece during these shoots.  Carly presented herself as she wished to be photographed.  It is apparent Carly’s new constructed self-image has been formed by the television that shares the composition of the photographs.  She has become “Carly TV.”

In the most recent photographs Bishop Good added a new twist by morphing her own face onto the faces in the famous paintings inserted onto the screen.  In these photographs, Bishop Good is not only the photographer, but like Cindy Sherman and Claude Cahun, she is the subject as well.  It is especially disturbing to se Bishop Good’s alert eyes darting out from the eye sockets of the dead Marat in Carly TV, Marat.  The television, the old master paintings and Bishop Good’s face are transformed by the computer while time, experience and television have shaped young Carly.

Director and Chief Curator

Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami

Essay part of publication for Project Series by Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale